Effects of inner volume field-of-view reduction on myocardial T2 mapping.

Background Inner volume (IV) excitation was explored with respect to scan time reduction of cardiac gated double inversion recovery multi-echo fast spin echo (MEFSE) to measure the transverse relaxation time (T2) in the myocardium. Methods The IV imaging was achieved by applying orthogonal slice selection for the excitation and refocusing pulses. The T2 map accuracy was investigated using different excitation and refocusing pulses. The performance of IV-MEFSE was compared with MEFSE on phantoms and eight healthy volunteers, acquiring eight echo times in a single breath-hold. Results Compared with MEFSE, IV-MEFSE allowed a scan time reduction from 26 s to 16 s, but caused a T2 overestimation of approximately 10% due to stimulated echoes. Conclusion IV successfully reduced the scan time to a single breath-hold feasible for many patients and remarkably facilitated the scan prescription, because there was no image aliasing concern. Care should be taken in using IV for T2 mapping because of T2 relaxation time overestimation. J. Magn. Reson. Imaging 2015;42:175–179. © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.